Whenever there's chaos, there's ambiguity, and where there's ambiguity, there's fear. And fear gets manipulated.

I have a lot of land. I bought it because I had a very strong feeling. I was in my early twenties, and I had grown up in Los Angeles and had seen that city slide off into the sea from the city I knew as a little kid. It lost its identity - suddenly there was cement everywhere and the green was gone and the air was bad - and I wanted out.

Sundance started with two acres back in 1963 that I bought from a sheepherder for $500. What has happened, I could see development starting to descend on the state of Utah. I thought I had better acquire more land to protect it. I thought that would probably be my legacy, to protect land.

I would see my hometown, Los Angeles, change. Green space and orange groves gave way to cement, freeways flooded with traffic, and air pollution, all in the name of "progress." I felt like I was losing my home. It had a profound effect on me, and I realized just how important nature was to my spirit, my soul, my point of view.

In fact you've got your hands tied behind your back when somebody chooses to take a low road in to you, there is nothing you can do about it, and so you just live with it and move on.

There's a lot of money to be made by strip-mining and drilling the dirtiest oil on the planet. But why should the rest of us pay the price?

It's hard to pay attention these days because of multiple affects of the information technology nowadays. You tend to develop a faster, speedier mind, but I don't think it's necessarily broader or smarter.